Recently, there has been an explosion in the use of optical fibre telecommunications as the main backbone for the carriage of data in telecommunications networks.
The installation or maintenance of large complex optical networks is often a major and expensive undertaking. Obviously, in planning, certain capacity requirements may have to be met. Optical systems operate in the real world and are subject to error rates due to inherent noise in the equipment utilized in the system and in nature generally.
In the planning of large scale optical systems, it is desirable to be able to simulate the performance of a system before installation or change so as to determine whether operational requirements will be met. Ideally, such simulation systems also provide for the simulation of bit error rates when applied to the system.
Unfortunately, the methods previously utilized in the simulation of bit error rates often lead to inaccurate simulation results. This is often a result of utilizing perhaps inappropriate Gaussian noise statistics when simulating bit error rates of an optical system.